Simsbury hearing closed on McLean expansion after months of debate over wetlands, stormwater and wildlife

The Simsbury Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Agency closed public comment Wednesday on a contentious application from McLean Affiliates Inc. to build 52 residential units and associated infrastructure on the southern portion of the McLean Retirement Community campus, leaving final permit decisions for a later meeting.

The hearing on the proposal centered on whether the project’s revised design would avoid or materially harm regulated wetlands and downstream watercourses. The applicant’s engineering team described changes that would reduce direct wetland disturbance at two crossing locations to small footprints and offer wetland enhancement; interveners and independent experts said the record is incomplete, especially on wildlife and hydrology.

Why it matters: the McLean campus is a long-established institutional campus and conservation land in Simsbury; the proposal would alter open meadow and upland areas near wetlands and Hop Meadow/Hop Brook and set a precedent for large institutional in-fill on sensitive parcels. Agency members heard competing technical evidence and legal argument before closing the hearing to begin deliberations.

What the applicant presented first

Attorney T. J. Donahue, representing McLean, and Tom Daley, the applicant’s engineer with SLR Consulting, reviewed a package of revisions the team said were made in response to earlier public comment and commission requests. Daley said the team moved from an embedded concrete box culvert to an open-span structure and then to the largest commercially available clear-span unit for the two crossings. “We reduced the direct, wetland soil impact by over 90%,” Daley said, giving figures that the crossing footprints would be roughly 95 and 25 square feet respectively…